Platform Weekly #44 - Did you see McKinsey's new platform engineering reference architectures?

Just a few months ago, if you wanted to build an Internal Developer Platform (IDP), you had to learn by doing. There was no tried and tested blueprint to follow – just the examples of big companies with way more money and resources than you. This made it hard to build platforms in an efficient, reliable way.

The team at McKinsey changed the game when they shared the first-ever reference architecture for Internal Developer Platforms at PlatformCon 2023 . They took what they learned from hundreds of real-life setups and turned it into standard patterns that anyone can follow. ?? Crazy cool, right?

Let’s take a look.

All of the tech and tools that can go into your IDP can be clustered into five main planes of functionality:

1. The Developer Control Plane level is where the primary interfaces for developers live. Good platforms let developers decide which interface to use on a workload-by-workload basis and keep existing workflows intact where possible by defaulting to code.
2. The Integration And Delivery Plane level has the tools that build, store, configure, and deploy requests from the developer control plane.
3. The Resource Plane level contains all resource components necessary to run the app. The resources are configured as code using Terraform.
4. The Monitoring And Logging Plane provides real-time metrics and logs for apps and infrastructure.
5. The Security Plane manages secrets and identity to protect sensitive information.

The image above shows what an AWS-based setup might look like. Organizations using this reference architecture should use this as a starting point and seek to incorporate whatever components are already in place. My team at Humanitec also developed reference architectures for GCP and Azure based on McKinsey’s model – highly recommend checking those, also!

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?Quick Bites

• Generative AI ?? causal AI

? ? ? ?Transforming DevOps innovation

Because ChatGPT won’t transform DevOps on its own, at least according to this Forbes opinion .

• An interesting podcast about the platform engineering pitfall you aren’t looking out for (yet).
• Something for your professional development. What does it mean to be a senior software engineer in big tech?

• Trying to wrap your head around the Platform Tooling Landscape ? The newest version on the updates platformengineering.org is great if you’re in a pinch.

And that’s a wrap on this week! As always, this newsletter is a community project. So if you have anything awesome to share from the cloud-native world, send it our way .

Stay crunchy ??

Luca